stimuli.ca » Art

New 3D Work: Paris, 2042

Rupert — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 22:17:23 +0000

Here is my entry, entitled “Triomphe 2042″ for the NVArt 05 competition on CGSociety. The original image is 2560×1600, 1.7MB! The pictures here are just small details of the original, and even they have been shrunk.

Paris, 2042. Buildings in the background.

This took a while to make.

Made in Maya, rendered in Mental Ray.

You can also check it out full size (Warning! 2560×1600, 1.7MB).

Moebius: God

Rupert — Mon, 15 Oct 2007 01:53:30 +0000

Rather than waiting until the aged genius passes away to bestow heaps of praises upon him, I figured I’d take a moment to create a tribute to the master of illustration: Jean Giraud.

Jean Giraud, aka Moebius, is the single greatest influence on my art. Born in Paris in 1938, he is in my opinion, by far the greatest illustrator to have lived. Moebius doesn’t have a particular style; rather, he has thousands of styles, often unique to the project he is working on. One of the founders and lead contributors to the seminal 1970′s comic magazine, Metal Hurlant (better known on this side of the Atlantic as Heavy Metal Magazine), his career has been as prolific as it has far reaching and influential.

You may know him indirectly from his contributions as storyboard artist for movies such as Alien, Abyss, 5th Element, Tron or countless others. His short comic with Dan O’Bannon, The Long Tomorrow, influenced the phenomenal movie Blade Runner as well as the writings of William Gibson, my favorite science fiction author.

I’ve learned so much from seeing and absorbing Moebius’ works. I’ve focused on drawing speed and line quality. I’ve learned to embrace the surreal and non-clich� in my own work, I’ve learned to adopt countless styles of drawing and creating, I’ve learned to play with narrative flow and just make stuff up as I go along. But my own work pales in comparison to the master.

I’ve long since stopped reading comics, and long since stopped drawing, yet the Moebius influence pervades my work even to this day. He was my last, and single greatest, influence in drawing.

There is precious little of his work on the web, and I don’t have a scanner, so alas I can’t provide many good examples of what he is capable of. Suffice to say I have at least 12 of his graphic novels, my favorite being his and Stan Lee’s epic Silver Surfer: Parable.

A thing of beauty, Silver Surfer is graceful, angelic and renaissance-inspired. Galactus is a massive false god who attempts to destroy human civilization. Page after page of jaw-dropping futuristic cityscapes, glass citadels and epic battles for earth’s fate.

Jean Giraud is a fountain of creativity. He is unto drawing, what Michelangelo is unto marble sculpture: pure genius. Horror, eroticism, fantasy, sci-fi, gorgeous desert landscapes, surrealism… he does it all, and better than I’ve seen it done before or since.

A documentary about Moebius is posted online at drawn.ca.

To see how strong an influence he was on my teenage mind, check out the old drawings at the bottom of my portfolio page.

A sublime short video: Together We Ride

Rupert — Mon, 10 Apr 2006 10:44:18 +0000

A little over a month ago I discovered an App called Democracy. As an aside, I first thought Democracy was a tongue in cheek name for their internet-TV-viewing product; after all, if “democracy” or choice and proactivity was reduced to watching videos on a screen, well… it seemed pretty trite. Especially considering the number of Americans who vote versus the number of Americans who watch TV.
But it turns out Democracy is not a tongue in cheek name; the developers called it that because in theory, everyone with camcorder and a PC (or rather: Mac) and an internet connection potentially has a voice in the world; their own “TV station” so to speak. At least among others with Computers and internet connections. So Democracy-the-App is a means of gathering said videos and attempting (though failing, IMHO) to present them in an intelligible, organized manner. Sounds noble.
But I digress. The first “Channel” I clicked on was as fate would have it, Some Pig. Some Pig is an outlet for very experimental (read: seriously weird and hilarious) videos, just the sort of thing I go for. The first video I watched was Rezelscheft, which… caught me off guard to say the least. Evil geniuses.
The second video I watched was Ten Second Holiday, which was poignant and mesmerizing.
The third video I watched, and the reason I am posting this, is the sublime dream-like Together We Ride by Kevin Hooyman. The simple beauty, the dreamy mistiness, the soft colors and silent, thoughtful creatures that inhabit this brief slice of empathy really hit me. This is a really fantastic video. I find it touching; a celebration of the better side of humanity that is not seen so often. Check it out.

Brian Jungen show at the Vancouver Art Gallery: phenomenal

Rupert — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 03:18:35 +0000

Wow. I saw many cool looking ads for the Brian Jungen show at the Vancouver Art Gallery (VAG) in downtown Vancouver. What little I saw looked pretty sweet. I almost forgot about the show when I saw a short blurb on him and his VAG show on Bravo while channel hopping. Again, the stuff he had made was looking mighty sweet. I decided I had to go, or potentially regret not going forever.
I went down to the VAG today to check it out. Was it as good as I had hoped? Short answer: yes. Long answer: freakin’ awesome. Best $10 I’ve spent in a long time.
I rarely go to art shows as the work being shown generally has little appeal to me. I’m hard to please. But virtually everything at the Brian Jungen exhibit rocked me; it was an astoundingly strong show of work.

My favorite pieces were the life-size whale skeletons made out of sawn white plastic lawn chairs bolted together. Beautiful, massive, mysterious, eye-candy with an implicit, but not too trite, message about what we leave behind when we’re gone. Sad, silent, ivory white behemoths suspended from the ceiling; a reminder of the past.

The other highlight of the show was his West Coast aboriginal masks made from Nike ‘Air Jordan’ shoes stitched together in creative ways. Which sounds daft but actually works; the back, white and red are the traditional colour palette of native art here. These are beautiful, weird, grotesque, majestic… I could go on. Instead, check the photos I took before (and after) a security guard informed me that taking pictures is not allowed.
I will be the first to admit that I’m not a fan of West Coast native art. Living in Vancouver, it’s everywhere; from the tacky sculptures and paintings at airports, hotels and parks to the boxes that smoked salmon comes in, to tasteless T shirts in tourist districts. I cringe when I see Emily Carr paintings (and thusly avoid the top floor of the VAG). I also find art that plays the white-guilting racial card irritatingly clich?. So it was great to see a show that was not “native art” but rather contemporary art that is strong, thought provoking and about as unclich? as any I’ve seen.

You owe it to yourself to check it out.